Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Lisa Butterworth, a mother of three in Boise, Idaho, began writing quietly on her blog, Blogspot.
She taught Sunday school and was closely involved with her church, but she also had beliefs she couldn’t articulate there—around feminism, around the history of women in the LDS Church, around the tension between the two. So he wrote them instead.
Feminist Mormon Housewives — fMh — was one of the most cited early instances of people using blogs to connect on ideas that didn’t fit their world.
A void that a blog fills
Butterworth’s original framework was precise: “I was very frustrated in the church because I couldn’t talk about a lot of the things that bothered me about history, about feminism. I wasn’t interested in insulting the church; I wanted to find something that could be faithful and liberal and feminist. I couldn’t find it, so I created it.”
This sentence is worth sitting with. He wasn’t trying to leave. He wasn’t trying to convert anyone. He was trying to think out loud in a community that shared his obligations, but also his tensions. The blog gave him that—and then, unexpectedly, it gave it to thousands of others who discovered they were waiting for the same thing.
It’s one of the earliest documented examples of what scholars later called “counter-public” discourse online: communities formed not against the dominant culture, but on its fringes, working on ideas not yet voiced at the center. Long before Twitter threads or Substack newsletters, fMh demonstrated that a Blogspot template and a handful of contributors could sustain something truly consistent.
What actually happened after 2005?
The blog has grown. Scholar and author Joanna Brooks, who left the LDS Church in the 1990s and later returned after the September Six disciplinary events, became one of its most prominent voices. Her writing at fMh and elsewhere helped her build an audience, eventually leading to her 2012 memoir. The Book of Mormon GirlA widely revised account of faith, doubt, and return that brings LDS feminist discourse into the mainstream literary conversation.
The fMh community remained active in the 2010s and continued to generate debate around women’s ordination, LGBTQ inclusion, and institutional transparency—topics that would shape the broader public debate about Mormonism, especially during the 2012 “Ordain Women” movement and the political significance of the LDS presidential campaign.
The arc of the blog reflects a pattern seen in dozens of early blogging communities: a passionate, niche-building audience; period of growth and media attention; gradual spread to social media platforms; and a legacy that lasts longer than the original shipping frequency. Archives remain a key resource for researchers studying early digital religious communities.
A lesson that never gets old
The reason FMh worked was not because it was counter-cultural. It was honest in capturing two things at once: faith and criticism, belonging and disagreement, loyalty and disillusionment. This combination, which may seem irresistible in physical community spaces, becomes what attracts readers online.
It’s important for bloggers and content creators today because the instinct in most content strategy is to resolve tension, not to maintain it. Lists are resolved. How to solve the instructions. Opinion pieces come together. But some of the most enduring blogs — and now newsletters and podcasts — are built on a refusal to settle, a willingness to write into the challenge rather than around it.
Butterworth didn’t have a content strategy. He needed it. The form came from that.
What is lost when platforms replace blogs?
A great advantage of the early blogosphere—and its nostalgic quality—was that it was structurally decentralized. Butterworth owned his field. Its archives were not subject to algorithm changes or the changing monetization policy of the platform. The community it creates cannot be deplatformed by a product decision.
This issue of ownership has become even more urgent. I personally feel that there is a decline in algorithmic platforms as sources of information, while there is a growing interest in direct subscription models – newsletters, membership sites, independent podcasts. What Butterworth did with the Blogspot URL in 2005 is structurally closer to what thoughtful creators are returning to now than it was during the peak-social-media era in between.
The lesson isn’t that blogging is back or that Substack is the new fMh. The lesson is that the impulse behind independent publishing—the need to speak to an audience that’s looking for you, in a space you control—was always the goal. Platforms come and go. This impulse is missing.
One final thought
The 2005 article that prompted this piece was written in the slightly confused tone of a queer reporter—a feminist Mormon, imagine. What the author couldn’t quite see was that Lisa Butterworth was ahead of the wave. He intuitively understood that a blog is not a megaphone. It was a room. A place where people who feel a gap between their inner and public lives can discover that they are not alone.
This is why the best blogs still exist. Not for broadcasting, but for gathering. Not to be sure, but to work with doubt in public – carefully, honestly, with readers who do the same.
In an age of content marketing and SEO-optimized publishing, it’s worth remembering that some of the most enduring digital communities are built by people who simply need a place to think.
